All-angle negative refraction and active flat lensing of ultraviolet light

Abstract

Decades ago, Veselago¹ predicted that a material with simultaneously negative electric and magnetic polarization responses would yield a ‘left-handed’ medium in which light propagates with opposite phase and energy velocities—a condition described by a negative refractive index. He proposed that a flat slab of left-handed material possessing an isotropic refractive index of −1 could act like an imaging lens in free space. Left-handed materials do not occur naturally, and it has only recently become possible to achieve a left-handed response using metamaterials, that is, electromagnetic structures engineered on subwavelength scales to elicit tailored polarization responses. So far, left-handed responses have typically been implemented using resonant metamaterials composed of periodic arrays of unit cells containing inductive–capacitive resonators and conductive wires. Negative refractive indices that are isotropic in two² or three³ dimensions at microwave frequencies have been achieved in resonant metamaterials with centimetre-scale features. Scaling the left-handed response to higher frequencies, such as infrared or visible, has been done by shrinking critical dimensions to submicrometre scales by means of top-down nanofabrication⁴. This miniaturization has, however, so far been achieved at the cost of reduced unit-cell symmetry, yielding a refractive index that is negative along only one axis. Moreover, lithographic scaling limits have so far precluded the fabrication of resonant metamaterials with left-handed responses at frequencies beyond the visible⁵. Here we report the experimental implementation of a bulk metamaterial with a left-handed response to ultraviolet light. The structure, based on stacked plasmonic waveguides⁶, yields an omnidirectional left-handed response for transverse magnetic polarization characterized by a negative refractive index. By engineering the structure to have a refractive index close to −1 over a broad angular range, we achieve Veselago flat lensing, in free space, of arbitrarily shaped, two-dimensional objects beyond the near field. We further demonstrate active, all-optical modulation of the image transferred by the flat lens.